


Play It Safe.

by carolinaa



Series: the b in b99 stands for bisexual [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Closeted Character, Episode: s05e10 Game Night, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 05:24:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14465961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinaa/pseuds/carolinaa
Summary: Jake isn't going to make Rosa's coming out all about him, but--it's making him question his comfortable spot in the closet.Just a little bit.





	Play It Safe.

Jake tries not to get upset about the fact that he’s just given his coming-out speech to Rosa, and it wasn’t even used to  _ come out _ to Rosa. It’s Rosa’s now. Jake can’t use it because he’s given it away, and now he needs to draft a new one.

It was the first time he’d said “I’m bi” out loud, and Rosa hadn’t even noticed how the words had caught in his throat and made him want to choke, because as far as she knew, he was just giving her ideas, he was just straightsplaining _ , _ or whatever.

He wasn’t going to use the speech anyway, he reminds himself. It was just a fanciful idea he’d had once, his sophomore year of college, the last time he’d even considered telling anyone.

Rosa looks comforted, though, which is what matters. Jake compartmentalizes and moves on. 

 

“You okay, buddy?” Charles asks him later, because Jake keeps sinking into unnecessary thoughts about what  _ could have  _ been, if he’d been a little braver a few years ago. Jake’s spacing out, stopping typing to stare into middle distance, and Charles seems to have picked up on it.

“Oh, yeah! Just sleepy. There was a Golden Girls marathon on last night,” Jake says, because Amy’s in a meeting and she isn’t there to call him out on this lie.

Jake used to lie a lot about thoughts like this. He’s not sure about how he feels about Rosa’s thing pulling him back into that habit.

 

He doesn’t know why he starts to spiral when Rosa’s parents look at her with that shock in their eyes. 

Well, he  _ does _ . But this is about Rosa right now, so he gets up and follows Rosa without arguing with her parents. He’s already too deeply involved in this--he super wishes he  _ wasn’t _ deeply involved in this--and he needs to make sure Rosa is okay. 

He doesn't catch up with her. He follows someone he’s pretty sure is Rosa--she was wearing a grey jacket, right?--on the subway until she gets onto a train too quickly for him to reach her. He’s lost at a weird station he’s never been to before and he feels like his lungs are collapsing in on themselves, for some reason. 

“Sorry, can you point me towards Brooklyn? I can’t read,” he tells the ticket person, who looks like they don’t get paid enough to deal with weirdos like him. 

“That platform, every ten minutes,” they say, and point. He goes. He forgets to say thank you, and doubles back to do so.

Jake watches trains enter and leave the station for an hour before he feels like he can get onto one. Amy greets him with a smile and he greets her with a smile. She doesn’t notice anything wrong, so maybe nothing is.

 

Rosa looks fine the next morning, but Jake knows better than to resist being the support that she needs when she invites him to game night. He voices discomfort, but  _ her _ discomfort definitely outpaces his, and he decides to grow a spine. 

“I’ll see you then,” Rosa says, and she almost smiles, and Jake feels like he should feel good about making her feel a little better about dealing with this. He feels jealous, instead, which isn’t a good-friend thing to feel.

Amy wasn’t horrified or uncomfortable when Rosa came out and--Jake thinks that  _ maybe _ that means she wouldn’t react badly if--but then he squashes that thought mercilessly. Amy’s his fiancée and that definitely means she expects some level of fidelity and it doesn’t  _ matter _ now anyway because he’s getting married to a woman and that means that men are off the table forever. There isn’t a point.

Jake doesn’t even know if he ever let men be an option. He’s making a big deal out of nothing.

He lets himself bang his head on his desk, just once, softly enough that nobody except Amy notices. She gives him a weird look, and he points a finger gun at her before going back to work.

 

Game night is a shitshow. Jake wants to hug Rosa, but he knows that she would stab him if he tried. She gets out of the building before she falters, and Jake almost runs into her because he’s looking over his shoulder, silently pleading for one of Rosa’s parents to come check on her, to apologize. 

“I’m sorry,” Jake says, when it’s clear that nobody’s following them. 

Rosa nods. She watches the concrete and crosses her arms. 

“They might just need some time,” Jake says. 

He wants this to go well for Rosa. He wants her to be able to be happy and out and loved. Because he’s a good friend. Not because he wants some sort of proof that it’s okay to drop a bombshell revelation on people you’ve known for years.

“Yeah.” Rosa’s voice is grating, like she has a lump in her throat. 

He decides to risk his safety and give her a hug. She responds in earnest, and he can tell that she needed it.

 

He watches Rosa hug her dad, and he feels like he’s about to cry. 

Dammit, he  _ is _ about to cry. He tears his gaze away from the window and gets up from his desk and makes a break for the bathroom, walking as casually as he can but still trying to be fast. 

Nobody calls him out, so he’s probably succeeded.

He spends too long trying to make his eyes stop looking red, and his chest hurts because he’s trying to keep himself from shaking. His skin is blotchy. This is a nightmare, everyone’s going to know, everyone’s going to know that he’s upset and they’re going to think something’s wrong but nothing’s  _ wrong.  _ Rosa’s dad loves her. Everything is fine. 

Jake is eternally and unchangeably fine. 

He returns to his desk an hour later. Amy asks where he was and he said he’d taken an emergency lunch break. His stomach rumbles. She doesn’t hear.

 

Gina catches him, the second time he ducks out to get his ongoing meltdown under control. She doesn’t  _ catch _ him so much as she just follows him without him noticing and clears her throat when he starts to splash cold water onto his face, effectively scaring the shit out of him because he’s blind in the moment and has no clue who’s behind him. 

“Oh,” he says, when he finally gets the water out of his eyes and can see her. “Hi, Gina.”

“You’re freaking out,” she says, impassive. “What’s up?”

Jake could say any number of things. He settles on, “Allergy season,” which is possibly the most obvious and blatant lie he could have decided on.

Gina narrows her eyes at him, but he must look pretty pathetic--he’s still sniffling--because she doesn’t challenge this. “Pollen’s a bitch.”

“Pollen is a sticky, sticky bitch,” he agrees, and she kicks him, presumably for using the word  _ bitch _ .

 

Jake doesn’t say much on the way home, and he should have known that that would be enough to tip Amy off. She waits until they get inside, and then she looks over at him and says, “You seem sad.”

“I think we should have a game night for Rosa,” Jake says, and gets his phone out to send something to the group chat that Rosa isn’t in. 

Amy doesn’t look away from him. His deflection hasn’t worked. “It’s nice of you to look out for her,” she says.

“She needs support right now.” Jake is coping with the very real fact that he’s never going to be out through making Rosa feel better about  _ her _ coming out. This is a healthy and totally normal thing to be doing. “Can you grab our board games?”

Amy stands her ground, which Jake should have realized she would do. “I will if you tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just--” Jake wants to say  _ I’m bi _ for real this time, but he looks at his fiancée, who he wants to hang out with for the rest of his life, and realizes that he can’t complicate this. “Game night is really important for Rosa and I want her to feel like people care about her.”

She nods, and she doesn’t look wholly convinced, but it seems to be answer enough. She stands and goes to the front closet to get their stack of games.

 

He thinks about the one time he directly admitted to anything relating to bisexuality--the last time he went past passing jokes about another guy’s looks. It had been years ago, the one of the last times he and Gina had a wine and whine session. 

It was late in the evening, they were wine-drunk and talking about Benji Harrison from high school, and Gina was talking about how he’d asked her to Prom and it had been the most wild experience of her life, and Jake unthinkingly,  _ stupidly _ chimed in with a “He was the one who played baseball, right? Damn, I had the  _ hugest  _ crush on him.”

And he froze, eyes darting to the ground. He wished he’d never opened his mouth.

Gina said, “ _ We all did _ ,” and kept rambling about something, but she soon realized that Jake wasn’t really listening, focused on the panic of accidentally admitting something like that. 

“I can forget I heard anything,” Gina offered, quietly, and Jake nodded in a jerky, unstable motion.

She must have gotten legitimately drunk and completely forgot, because she never brings up anything remotely related again. Jake doesn’t know if that’s a relief or not.

 

The more Jake brainstorms a new coming out speech, the more he's convinced that this is a problem for Future Jake. 

Present Jake closes his Google search tab on “ways to casualy come out to ur fiancee” and gets back to work.


End file.
